The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 eBook

C.

[Footnote 2: In the ‘Spectator’s’
time numbering of houses was so rare that in Hatton’s
‘New View of London’, published in 1708,
special mention is made of the fact that

’in Prescott Street, Goodman’s
Fields, instead of signs the houses are
distinguished by numbers, as the staircases
in the Inns of Court and
Chancery.’]

[Footnote 3: sheep]

[Footnote 4: The sign before her Waxwork Exhibition,
in Fleet Street, near Temple Bar, was ‘the Golden
Salmon.’ She had very recently removed
to this house from her old establishment in St. Martin’s
le Grand.]

[Footnote 5: Ben Jonson’s Alchemist having
taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for
the device of a sign—­’a good lucky
one, a thriving sign’—­will give him
nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation
he was born under, but says:

‘Subtle’. He shall
have ‘a bel’, that’s ‘Abel’;
And
by it standing one whose name is ‘Dee’
In
a ‘rug’ grown, there’s ‘D’
and ‘rug’, that’s ‘Drug’:
And
right anenst him a dog snarling ‘er’,
There’s
‘Drugger’, Abel Drugger. That’s
his sign.
And
here’s now mystery and hieroglyphic.

‘Face’. Abel, thou
art made.

‘Drugger’. Sir, I do
thank his worship.]

[Footnote 6: Bel, in the apocryphal addition
to the Book of Daniel, called ’the ‘History
of the Destruction of Bel and the Dragon.’]

* * * *
*

No. 29. Tuesday, April 3, 1711 Addison

There is nothing that [has] more startled our English
Audience, than the Italian Recitativo at its
first Entrance upon the Stage. People were wonderfully
surprized to hear Generals singing the Word of Command,
and Ladies delivering Messages in Musick. Our
Country-men could not forbear laughing when they heard
a Lover chanting out a Billet-doux, and even the Superscription
of a Letter set to a Tune. The Famous Blunder
in an old Play of Enter a King and two Fidlers
Solus, was now no longer an Absurdity, when it
was impossible for a Hero in a Desart, or a Princess
in her Closet, to speak anything unaccompanied with
Musical Instruments.

But however this Italian method of acting in
Recitativo might appear at first hearing, I
cannot but think it much more just than that which
prevailed in our English Opera before this Innovation:
The Transition from an Air to Recitative Musick being
more natural than the passing from a Song to plain
and ordinary Speaking, which was the common Method
in Purcell’s Operas.